


Draco/Rest

by zeitgeistic (faire_weather)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Estrangement, M/M, Marriage, Old Age, Past Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 22:20:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4852673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faire_weather/pseuds/zeitgeistic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry’s estranged husband has never really been estranged to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Draco/Rest

**Author's Note:**

> I have been listening to too much Bon Iver. “Beth/Rest” always makes me such a mess.
> 
> FOLLOW ME ON TUMBLR for snippets, what I'm working on next, and to ask me anything :) [lol-zeitgeistic on Tumblr](http://lol-zeitgeistic.tumblr.com/)

Harry has been married ninety-six years. He hasn’t touched his husband in eighty-nine. But god, how he wants to most days.

On Sundays, they have a standing date at the Sainsbury’s. Draco doesn’t eat Muggle food, but he buys it anyway. Harry sees him in the frozen foods section, and they stare at freeze-dried Yorkshire puddings instead of each other. Draco takes a pack and Harry does, too, and their fingers brush as they reach for the same one. This has never happened before; it’s not supposed to happen.

Harry has been married ninety-six years and estranged for eighty-nine and it’s been seventeen seconds since he touched his husband.

It burns Harry’s skin as fiercely today as it ever did and he _wants_.

Now he’s old, and all his friends are dying, and he’s been in a broken love affair with his husband for nearly a century.

He wonders if they could’ve fixed this if they’d tried harder. He wonders if they’ve wasted the last eighty-nine years of their lives waiting for the other to move first. He wonders if he should’ve never fallen in love with Draco and if he hadn’t, if maybe he’d have lived a happy life.

Those first months, they’d been perfect. Harry remembers the sharp nip of Draco’s twenty-two-year-old teeth against his jaw and the heat of his body against Harry’s own. He remembers Draco’s laugh and the way he takes his tea. He remembers his strange morning rituals and sometimes Harry wakes up from a particularly vivid dream and thinks he’s twenty-five again and he rolls over, tossing his leg over a thigh that isn’t there, and falls flat against the bed. He remembers the heavy heat of Draco’s cock and how his own twenty-two-year-old body had ached to be near Draco’s every hour of the day.

He remembers being twenty-seven and the arguments. They might’ve had that for ninety-six years. Instead of accidentally-not-really seeing each other at the shops every Sunday, they might’ve gone together, argued over which tomato to get, instead of avoiding each other altogether to avoid arguing _altogether_.

 _My kingdom for a Time-Turner_ , he thinks. Draco looks his way; their eyes hold, their eyes let go; Harry pays the cashier and he leaves.

 

-x-

They never got divorced.

Harry doesn’t know why. He thinks maybe it’s because neither of them wanted to admit it was over, and so they never let it be, and so they’ve been stuck like this ever since. Unable to move on. Unable to want to.

If Hermione were alive, she would have something to say about it. She always did when she was. Harry is one-hundred-and-eighteen years old now and while he’s in good shape and health for a wizard his age, his heart feels old. He thinks maybe he’d still have a good thirty years ahead of him if he’d had Draco around but he hopes that he doesn’t.

He lives with Ron again, just like he did right after Hogwarts. They’ve had ten years to fall back into bad habits from their early years. Without Hermione to keep them in line, they subsist predominantly on beer and take-away and loneliness.

Ron still grieves for her, even a decade later, but he had eighty years with her as his wife, and he has the comfort of knowing that his wife died in love with him. Harry has never really known if he will. He thinks maybe, and he hopes, but he’s wasted a lot of years hoping, and he knows now that it’s not the way to live a life.

Ron hands him a beer and a bag of curry and Harry grabs it before he can drop it. Ron’s hands shake badly these days and his freckles have turned into blotchy brown spots all over them.

“Alright, Harry?” he says, a mockery of their youth.

“Alright,” Harry murmurs.

They don’t have much to talk about. Ron likes to watch the photographs of Hermione and the kids from long ago when she was young and vibrant and still complaining about pregnancy stretch marks on her hips. She swings Hugo around in the air, her hair flying everywhere, and that’s how Harry’s gut feels every Sunday afternoon when he gets back from the shops.

Next Sunday is Draco’s birthday and a century to the day since Harry first kissed him. He thinks about the Mirror of Erised sometimes and regrets not listening to Dumbledore. He has dwelled on dreams and forgotten how to live. Harry stares into the fire and he aches.

 

-x-

 _Which one of us called it?_ Harry wonders, when he sees him in the Sainsbury’s next Sunday. _Did we even call it?_

It’s been eighty-nine years since he’s had sex and sixty-five since he wanted it. Nineteen years celibate had all come crashing down on him one night and he’d thought, maybe, intimacy with anyone would’ve been preferable to emptiness. He’d been wrong. He’d nearly kissed him, some anonymous man, but then he’d seen his wedding ring as his hand cradled the man’s face, and he’d been horrified.

But sometimes, on Sundays, he misses the intimacy of it. He misses the feel of another person inside or around him. He misses hot, panted breaths on his spine and fingers interlocking with his own, squeezing, transmitting something Harry’s never known how to define. He even misses holding hands.

Their carts bump in the bakery section. Draco seems startled by him today. When their eyes meet, Harry is undone by the clarity of the colour, after all these years. Harry has dreamed about eyes this colour his whole life but he always loses his breath when he actually sees them.

He’s been married for ninety-six years and it’s been eighty-nine since he’s spoken to his husband. Something catches in his throat and he struggles to swallow, to breathe. He thinks he might be dying and while he’d prefer it not to be with the indignity of collapsing in a Muggle grocery store, he would welcome the end of it all.

“Happy birthday,” Harry says, unthinking. His voice catches, as it often does these days, and the words come out dry and brittle, not unlike Harry himself.

Draco’s throat works for a moment. His hair is all white now and hanging down past his shoulders like a proper wizard, or a vagrant maybe if the Muggles were asked. He plaits it sometimes and Harry likes that. He remembers running his fingers through Draco’s plait when he’d just started growing it out, when they were twenty-seven. It was short then, barely enough for three knots in the tail.

“Thanks,” Draco says, and his voice sounds old, too, but beneath it all, Harry hears the man he married when he was twenty-two years old. He hears the man he fell in love with when he was nineteen. In the infinitesimal span of seconds that passes then, Harry’s life flashes before his eyes, but this time, he sees it as it would’ve been if they’d never separated. It would’ve been loud and hellish, angry and passionate, soft and funny. It would’ve been the best life in the world.

 _Aren’t we married?_ he wonders. Couldn’t they start again? Would it ever really be too late?

He’s been married ninety-six years and estranged for eighty-nine and it’s been seventeen seconds since he spoke to his husband. He is frozen there, unsure. Draco’s eyes flick away, uncomfortable even after all this time.

Harry nods, picks up a loaf of bread at random, and turns away. Neither of them are attractive men anymore, but Harry falls in love again with Draco every Sunday anyway.

 

-x-

Harry could draw Draco’s body from memory. His eyesight has always been shit and it’s only worsened over the years, but he’s never needed eyes to map Draco. He knows the feel of his skin like he knows the feel of his own wand. It’s changed throughout the years, Harry knows, but his memory is stuck on the last time he felt it.

That last time together in their flat with the heat of summer streaming in through their open bedroom window. Draco had sprawled on their bed, offering himself to Harry, his mouth pulled into a grin, his eyes crinkling. His short plait had already come half-undone.

“Mine,” Harry’d said as he fell on top of him. He kissed down Draco’s jaw, growling when Draco laughed at him. Draco’s arms had come up to pull his body flush and Harry had melted into him and known that they’d always be like this. They argued and fought and argued again, but it always came back to this, to Harry falling in love with Draco every day, each time just as hard as the last, unable to help himself.

“Fine, yours,” Draco had said. Harry remembers it without fail. He knows this conversation as clearly as if he were watching it in a pensieve.

When he’d slid home inside Draco, their fingers had interlocked, and the flare of Harry’s wedding band catching the sunlight from outside had caught his attention. He’d fucked Draco slowly, mesmerised by the sight of the gold flashing. Mesmerised, as he always was, that it was real.

The next morning, they’d fought spectacularly, and Draco’d stormed out, and when Harry’d come home from work that night, Draco’s things were gone. He doesn’t have to remember the gutted feeling he had in the moment he realised it; he still feels it.

Have they wasted all these years? Harry honestly doesn’t know. He never has. Even when they were still young enough to fix things, he hadn’t known. He wonders if it’s really a waste if this was the only way he could’ve had his husband.

Harry’s been married ninety-six years. He hasn’t kissed his husband in eighty-nine. They’ve both been alone for a century, but sometimes, on Sundays, Harry thinks it’s almost like their affair never stopped. It never has for him, anyway. It’s only resting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> __
> 
> I said your love is known  
> I'm standing up on it  
> Aren't we married?  
> I ain't living in the dark no more  
> It's not a promise  
> I'm just gonna call it  
> – Bon Iver - "Beth/Rest"

**Author's Note:**

> FOLLOW ME ON TUMBLR for snippets, what I'm working on next, and to ask me anything :) [lol-zeitgeistic on Tumblr](http://lol-zeitgeistic.tumblr.com/)


End file.
